Scenes From The Bluest Eye

I had the opportunity to view the screen adaptation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye at the Horizon Theatre in Little Five Points and absolutely loved it. The play brought to life the themes of racial self hatred, generational emotional issues, and the conditioning that causes the characters to believe that their way of life. The writings of Toni Morrison, as adapted by Lydia Diamond, continue to spark internalization about our own ideas about success, beauty, and the preconceived notions with regards to the formula for happiness. This stage play format allows the viewer to more directly connect with this story.

“The Bluest Eye” is an important story because it tells an all too familiar story about those who fall outside of the small box that is “American Culture.” Women, minorities, widows, homosexuals, divorces, and those with physical and mental disabilities—all those who are vulnerable to falling into the trap of believing, “You’re not beautiful; you’re not relevant; you’re invisible; you don’t even count”—Pecola tells their story. The play painfully follows the life of a family marred by pain, loss, rape, judgment, transitions, abuse, and the continuation of this cycle through a new generation of three young girls. Claudia, the narrator in her opening monologue [following a dramatic reading from a Dick & Jane Reader] explains, “Since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.” The play details the “how.” Morrison poignantly argues the manner in which our country has dealt with race, the way in which socioeconomic divisors have limited our reach, and the way in which the aforementioned have cause us to turn manifest our hurt on each other. Blacks rarely get the opportunity to identify the source of generational dysfunction, and to, in part, blame it on slavery, oppression, segregation, and disparity. Its interesting to see the level of pain the young ladies feel and how outward they are with their emotions, but their adults parents have the ability to be so introverted and callous—almost to as though they have accepted things are as good as they are supposed to be. The story is relevant for blacks and whites alike as it allows up to come to grips with our own insecurities and possibly understands what others deal with.

Each character in their own way is searching for love and identity, and to belong without conflict. There a connection between the white hunters' "rape" of Cholly and the sexual aggression he eventually turned on Pecola. Cholly was emasculated at a young age, finds himself in a marriage that is simply focused on the business of staying alive and “indoors.” The narrator describes the family as “ugly.” Interestingly enough “ugly” seems to represent anything that is undesirable or strays away from the accepted image of beauty. Rich is beautiful. White is beautiful. Like a dog who looses it’s mind after being caged in a pet store for too long, doomed to an existence of walking in circles and longing to be on the other sides of the glass, Cholly lost his life after that “rape.” His life was never the same again, and perhaps that was his last happy moment. When the activities of Pecola mimicked that of her mother, Cholly perhaps left his body for the moment and imagined he was again in that happy place. Like the hunters, Cholly was unresponsive to her pain, and acted with the understanding that he did so without the fear of consequences. Cholly was just a colored boy; Pecola is just a colored girl. Cholly and Pecola are both extremely tragic characters shaped by circumstances and the world around them but of the world they inhabit but do not control. The Bluest Eye is not about race and it is not about sexuality, but about unfortunate characters, dealing with these issues and how the world around them receives and affirms them.

The Breedloves move to the North along with six million other Southern black people, under the impression that there is greater level of tolerance in the North. Interestingly enough they were not seeking equality or wealth, just tolerance. They would find that the North was still America, although the racism was not as blatant and public, the doctrine of “separate but equal” remained a way of life. White dolls, “Dick and Jane” readers, Shirley Temple imagery, and Mary Jane candies reinforced these ideologies. The reinforced the idea that white was right, that white was beautiful and that one should look up to this. Pecola aspired to having blue eyes—to be white—because she deemed this the only escape from her circumstances. She perhaps came by these feelings of inadequacy naturally. Her mother lost sense of reality and used movies as her escape and to define beauty. “She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen….” While unconscious, Mrs. Breedlove’s internal ideas about beauty are just as absorbed as her daughters belief that blue eyes could change all of the inequalities in their lives.

These characters’ lives are made that much worse because they all hate something about themselves. Even in idealized characters like Maureen Peal racial self-hatred manifest through her attempt to pass in order to appear superficially superior to her peers. The Bluest Eye highlights several internal conflicts that re still prevalent in the black community and ideas that are to relevant most. The notion that that lighter skin, straighter hair, and other androgynous Euro features are better and define beauty. Morrison and Diamond each challenge readers and viewers, respectivly, of this story to focus on more relevant things than stereotypical beauty such as integrity, love, and attributes that are constructive.

I encourange you to read The Bluest Eye if you have not and re-read it if you have not!

Check your local library or hit up amazon.com.

Toni Morrison Speaks about being a "Foreigner"

..::Listening to Lewis Allen's Strange Fruit as preformed by India.Arie:..